Abstract: Automatic detection of syllable repetition is one of the
important parameter in assessing the stuttered speech objectively.
The existing method which uses artificial neural network (ANN)
requires high levels of agreement as prerequisite before attempting to
train and test ANNs to separate fluent and nonfluent. We propose
automatic detection method for syllable repetition in read speech for
objective assessment of stuttered disfluencies which uses a novel
approach and has four stages comprising of segmentation, feature
extraction, score matching and decision logic. Feature extraction is
implemented using well know Mel frequency Cepstra coefficient
(MFCC). Score matching is done using Dynamic Time Warping
(DTW) between the syllables. The Decision logic is implemented by
Perceptron based on the score given by score matching. Although
many methods are available for segmentation, in this paper it is done
manually. Here the assessment by human judges on the read speech
of 10 adults who stutter are described using corresponding method
and the result was 83%.
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel architecture for developing decision support systems. Unlike conventional decision support systems, the proposed architecture endeavors to reveal the decision-making process such that humans' subjectivity can be incorporated into a computerized system and, at the same time, to preserve the capability of the computerized system in processing information objectively. A number of techniques used in developing the decision support system are elaborated to make the decisionmarking process transparent. These include procedures for high dimensional data visualization, pattern classification, prediction, and evolutionary computational search. An artificial data set is first employed to compare the proposed approach with other methods. A simulated handwritten data set and a real data set on liver disease diagnosis are then employed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach. The results are analyzed and discussed. The potentials of the proposed architecture as a useful decision support system are demonstrated.
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to characterize the spontaneous Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of four different motor imagery tasks and to show hereby a possible solution for the present binary communication between the brain and a machine ora Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The processing technique used in this paper was the fractal analysis evaluated by the Critical Exponent Method (CEM). The EEG signal was registered in 5 healthy subjects,sampling 15 measuring channels at 1024 Hz.Each channel was preprocessed by the Laplacian space ltering so as to reduce the space blur and therefore increase the spaceresolution. The EEG of each channel was segmented and its Fractaldimension (FD) calculated. The FD was evaluated in the time interval corresponding to the motor imagery and averaged out for all the subjects (each channel). In order to characterize the FD distribution,the linear regression curves of FD over the electrodes position were applied. The differences FD between the proposed mental tasks are quantied and evaluated for each experimental subject. The obtained results of the proposed method are a substantial fractal dimension in the EEG signal of motor imagery tasks and can be considerably utilized as the multiple-states BCI applications.
Abstract: Exploring an autistic child in Elementary school is a
difficult task that must be fully thought out and the teachers should
be aware of the many challenges they face raising their child
especially the behavioral problems of autistic children. Hence there
arises a need for developing Artificial intelligence (AI)
Contemporary Techniques to help diagnosis to discover autistic
people.
In this research, we suggest designing architecture of expert
system that combine Cognitive Maps (CM) with Case Based
Reasoning technique (CBR) in order to reduce time and costs of
traditional diagnosis process for the early detection to discover
autistic children. The teacher is supposed to enter child's information
for analyzing by CM module. Then, the reasoning processor would
translate the output into a case to be solved a current problem by
CBR module. We will implement a prototype for the model as a
proof of concept using java and MYSQL.
This will be provided a new hybrid approach that will achieve new
synergies and improve problem solving capabilities in AI. And we
will predict that will reduce time, costs, the number of human errors
and make expertise available to more people who want who want to
serve autistic children and their families.
Abstract: Many states are now committed to implementing
international human rights standards domestically. In terms of
practical governance, how might effectiveness be measured? A facevalue
answer can be found in domestic laws and institutions relating
to human rights. However, this article provides two further tools to
help states assess their status on the spectrum of robust to fragile
human rights governance. The first recognises that each state has its
own 'human rights history' and the ideal end stage is robust human
rights governance, and the second is developing criteria to assess
robustness. Although a New Zealand case study is used to illustrate
these tools, the widespread adoption of human rights standards by
many states inevitably means that the issues are relevant to other
countries. This is even though there will always be varying degrees of
similarity-difference in constitutional background and developed or
emerging human rights systems.
Abstract: Human activities are increasingly based on the use of remote resources and services, and on the interaction between
remotely located parties that may know little about each other. Mobile agents must be prepared to execute on different hosts with
various environmental security conditions. The aim of this paper is to
propose a trust based mechanism to improve the security of mobile
agents and allow their execution in various environments. Thus, an
adaptive trust mechanism is proposed. It is based on the dynamic interaction between the agent and the environment. Information
collected during the interaction enables generation of an environment
key. This key informs on the host-s trust degree and permits the mobile agent to adapt its execution. Trust estimation is based on
concrete parameters values. Thus, in case of distrust, the source of problem can be located and a mobile agent appropriate behavior can
be selected.
Abstract: Formaldehyde is the illegal chemical substance used
for food preservation in fish and vegetable. It can promote
carcinogenesis. Superoxide dismutases are the important
antioxidative enzymes that catalyze the dismutation of superoxide
anion into oxygen and hydrogen peroxide. The resultant level of
oxidative stress in formaldehyde-treated lymphocytes was
investigated. The formaldehyde concentrations of 0, 20, 40, 60, 80
and 120μmol/L were treated in human lymphocytes for 12 hours.
After 12 treated hours, the superoxide dismutase activity change was
measured in formaldehyde-treated lymphocytes. The results showed
that the formaldehyde concentrations of 60, 80 and 120μmol/L
significantly decreased superoxide dismutase activities in
lymphocytes (P < 0.05). The change of superoxide dismutase
activity in formaldehyde-treated lymphocytes may be the biomarker
for detect cellular injury, such as damage to DNA, due to
formaldehyde exposure.
Abstract: It has formed an essential issue that Climate Change, composed of highly knowledge complexity, reveals its significant impact on human existence. Therefore, specific national policies, some of which present the educational aspects, have been published for overcoming the imperative problem. Accordingly, the study aims to analyze as well as integrate the relationship between Climate Change and environmental education and apply the perspective of concept map to represent the knowledge contents and structures of Climate Change; by doing so, knowledge contents of Climate Change could be represented in an even more comprehensive way and manipulated as the tool for environmental education. The method adapted for this study is knowledge conversion model compounded of the platform for experts and teachers, who were the participants for this study, to cooperate and combine each participant-s standpoints into a complete knowledge framework that is the foundation for structuring the concept map. The result of this research contains the important concepts, the precise propositions and the entire concept map for representing the robust concepts of Climate Change.
Abstract: A state of the art Speaker Identification (SI) system
requires a robust feature extraction unit followed by a speaker
modeling scheme for generalized representation of these features.
Over the years, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC)
modeled on the human auditory system has been used as a standard
acoustic feature set for speech related applications. On a recent
contribution by authors, it has been shown that the Inverted Mel-
Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (IMFCC) is useful feature set for
SI, which contains complementary information present in high
frequency region. This paper introduces the Gaussian shaped filter
(GF) while calculating MFCC and IMFCC in place of typical
triangular shaped bins. The objective is to introduce a higher
amount of correlation between subband outputs. The performances
of both MFCC & IMFCC improve with GF over conventional
triangular filter (TF) based implementation, individually as well as
in combination. With GMM as speaker modeling paradigm, the
performances of proposed GF based MFCC and IMFCC in
individual and fused mode have been verified in two standard
databases YOHO, (Microphone Speech) and POLYCOST
(Telephone Speech) each of which has more than 130 speakers.
Abstract: This study was designed to formulate,
pharmaceutically evaluate a topical skin-care cream (w/o emulsion)
of Aloe Vera versus its vehicle (Base) as control and determine their
effects on Stratum Corneum (SC) water content and Transepidermal
water loss (TEWL). Base containing no extract and a Formulation
containing 3% concentrated extract of Aloe Vera was developed by
entrapping in the inner aqueous phase of w/o emulsion (cream).
Lemon oil was incorporated to improve the odor. Both the Base and
Formulation were stored at 8°C ±0.1°C (in refrigerator), 25°C±0.1°C,
40°C±0.1°C and 40°C± 0.1°C with 75% RH (in incubator) for a
period of 4 weeks to predict their stability. The evaluation parameters
consisted of color, smell, type of emulsion, phase separation,
electrical conductivity, centrifugation, liquefaction and pH. Both the
Base and Formulation were applied to the cheeks of 21 healthy
human volunteers for a period of 8 weeks Stratum corneum (SC)
water content and Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) were
monitored every week to measure any effect produced by these
topical creams. The expected organoleptic stability of creams was
achieved from 4 weeks in-vitro study period. Odor was disappeared
with the passage of time due to volatilization of lemon oil. Both the
Base and Formulation produced significant (p≤0.05) changes in
TEWL with respect to time. SC water content was significantly
(p≤0.05) increased by the Formulation while the Base has
insignificant (p 0.05) effects on SC water content. The newly
formulated cream of Aloe Vera, applied is suitable for improvement
and quantitative monitoring of skin hydration level (SC water
content/ moisturizing effects) and reducing TEWL in people with dry
skin.
Abstract: Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is one of the
densely populated cities in the world. Due to rapid urbanization 60%
of its population lives in slum and squatter settlements. The reason
behind this poverty is low economic growth, inequitable distribution
of income, unequal distribution of productive assets, unemployment
and underemployment, high rate of population growth, low level of
human resource development, natural disasters, and limited access to
public services. Along with poverty, creating pressure on urban land,
shelter, plots, open spaces this creates environmental and ecological
degradation. These constraints are mostly resulted from the failures
of the government policies and measures and only Government can
solve this problem. This is now prime time to establish planning and
environmental management policy and sustainable urban
development for the city and for the urban slum dwellers which are
free from eviction, criminals, rent seekers and other miscreants.
Abstract: Public parks are placed high on the research agenda, with many studies addressing their social, economic and environment influences in different countries around the world. They have been recognized as contributors to the physical quality of urban environments. Recently, a broader view of public parks has emerged. This view goes well beyond the traditional value of parks as places for more recreation and visual delight, to depict them as valuable contributors to broader strategic objectives, such as property values, place attractiveness, job opportunities, social belonging, public health, tourist development, and improving the overall quality of life. This research examines the role of public parks in enhancing the quality of human life in Egyptian environment. It measures 'quality of life' in terms of 'human needs' and 'well-being'. This should open ways for policymakers, practitioners, researchers and the public to realize the potentials of public parks towards improving the quality of life.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a morphing method by which face color images can be freely transformed. The main focus of this work is the transformation of one face image to another. This method is fully automatic in that it can morph two face images by automatically detecting all the control points necessary to perform the morph. A face detection neural network, edge detection and medium filters are employed to detect the face position and features. Five control points, for both the source and target images, are then extracted based on the facial features. Triangulation method is then used to match and warp the source image to the target image using the control points. Finally color interpolation is done using a color Gaussian model that calculates the color for each particular frame depending on the number of frames used. A real coded Genetic algorithm is used in both the image warping and color blending steps to assist in step size decisions and speed up the morphing. This method results in ''very smooth'' morphs and is fast to process.
Abstract: This paper presents a highly efficient algorithm for detecting and tracking humans and objects in video surveillance sequences. Mean shift clustering is applied on backgrounddifferenced image sequences. For efficiency, all calculations are performed on integral images. Novel corresponding exponential integral kernels are introduced to allow the application of nonuniform kernels for clustering, which dramatically increases robustness without giving up the efficiency of the integral data structures. Experimental results demonstrating the power of this approach are presented.
Abstract: A automatic human tracking system using mobile
agent technology is realized because a mobile agent moves in
accordance with a migration of a target person. In this paper, we
propose a method for determining the neighbor node in consideration
of the imaging range of cameras.
Abstract: Wireless capsule endoscopy provides real-time images in the digestive tract. Capsule images are usually low resolution and are diverse images due to travel through various regions of human body. Color information has been a primary reference in predicting abnormalities such as bleeding. Often color is not sufficient for this purpose. In this study, we took morphological shapes into account as additional, but important criterion. First, we processed gastric images in order to indentify various objects in the image. Then, we analyzed color information in the object. In this way, we could remove unnecessary information and increase the accuracy. Compared to our previous investigations, we could handle images of various degrees of brightness and improve our diagnostic algorithm.
Abstract: MicroRNAs are an important class of gene expression
regulators that are involved in many biological processes including
embryogenesis. miR-125b is a conserved microRNA that is enriched
in the nervous system. We have previously reported the function of
miR-125b in neuronal differentiation of human cell lines. We also
discovered the function of miR-125b in regulating p53 in human and
zebrafish. Here we further characterize the brain defects in zebrafish
embryos injected with morpholinos against miR-125b. Our data
confirm the essential role of miR-125b in brain morphogenesis
particularly in maintaining the balance between proliferation, cell
death and differentiation. We identified lunatic fringe (lfng) as an
additional target of miR-125b in human and zebrafish and suggest
that lfng may mediate the function of miR-125b in neurogenesis.
Together, this report reveals new insights into the function of miR-
125b during neural development of zebrafish.
Abstract: Visual secret sharing (VSS) was proposed by Naor and Shamir in 1995. Visual secret sharing schemes encode a secret image into two or more share images, and single share image can’t obtain any information about the secret image. When superimposes the shares, it can restore the secret by human vision. Due to the traditional VSS have some problems like pixel expansion and the cost of sophisticated. And this method only can encode one secret image. The schemes of encrypting more secret images by random grids into two shares were proposed by Chen et al. in 2008. But when those restored secret images have much distortion, those schemes are almost limited in decoding. In the other words, if there is too much distortion, we can’t encrypt too much information. So, if we can adjust distortion to very small, we can encrypt more secret images. In this paper, four new algorithms which based on Chang et al.’s scheme be held in 2010 are proposed. First algorithm can adjust distortion to very small. Second algorithm distributes the distortion into two restored secret images. Third algorithm achieves no distortion for special secret images. Fourth algorithm encrypts three secret images, which not only retain the advantage of VSS but also improve on the problems of decoding.
Abstract: The paper deals with the analysis of the dynamic
response of footbridges under human - induced dynamic loads.
This is a frequently occurring and often dominant load for
footbridges as it stems from the very purpose of a footbridge - to
convey pedestrian. Due to the emergence of new materials and
advanced engineering technology, slender footbridges are
increasingly becoming popular to satisfy the modern transportation
needs and the aesthetical requirements of the society. These
structures however are always lively with low stiffness, low mass,
low damping and low natural frequencies. As a consequence, they are
prone to vibration induced by human activities and can suffer severe
vibration serviceability problems, particularly in the lateral direction.
Pedestrian bridges are designed according to first and second limit
states, these are the criteria involved in response to static design load.
However, it is necessary to assess the dynamic response of bridge
design load on pedestrians and assess it impact on the comfort of the
user movement. Usually the load is considered a person or a small
group which can be assumed in perfect motion synchronization.
Already one person or small group can excite significant vibration of
the deck. In order to calculate the dynamic response to the movement
of people, designer needs available and suitable computational model
and criteria. For the calculation program ANSYS based on finite
element method was used.
Abstract: A multi fingered dexterous anthropomorphic hand is
being developed by the authors. The focus of the hand is the
replacement of human operators in hazardous environments and also
in environments where zero tolerance is observed for the human
errors. The robotic hand will comprise of five fingers (four fingers
and one thumb) each having four degrees of freedom (DOF) which
can perform flexion, extension, abduction, adduction and also
circumduction. For the actuation purpose pneumatic muscles and
springs will be used. The paper exemplifies the mechanical design for
the robotic hand. It also describes different mechanical designs that
have been developed before date.